Category: play

The “got it” rule for passing and AI chess.

My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let go until you hear the recipient say “got it.” Like other great techniques, it seems like an obvious thing to do but isn’t. (Groups of people drop [...]

Role playing.

In a few years, if technology and media companies continue to innovate at their current breakneck pace, entertainment will finally be as interactive as it was in 1599, when the Globe theater was built. I was reminded of just how much we misplace the past while watching a YouTube clip of Andy Kaufman performing his [...]

possible alternative reality games involving celebrities

you, the protagonist, are accidentally emailed the login / confirmation email intended for someone who is quite famous. you become his/her doppelganger. it’s your choice whether you become the celebrity’s guardian angel or a shadowy trickster. you can alternate between both poles. the objective is to interact with the celebrity’s environment (his/her business contacts, press, [...]

Playing fetch.

One of our dogs loves to play fetch. The more the object he is fetching behaves like prey (a bouncing ball can change its trajectory in unexpected ways), the more our dog enjoys the game. It would give him great pleasure to catch his next meal (food!). When we play fetch, he gets to experience [...]

Does politics need to be entertaining? Yes.

Writing about Sarah Palin and more recently enjoying parodies of Glenn Beck I’ve been thinking on and off about political theater. Or rather, how difficult it is to separate politics and theater. We make sense of the world via narrative. It’s not a crutch – it’s how we get around. The proper response to Beck [...]

It’s the scripts, stupid.

There’s a presentation making the rounds lately that pokes fun at companies hoping to “capture the magic” of the Apple iPhone by making devices that are superficially similar but substantively different – or inferior. Namely, with similar hardware but different software. There’s a very simple, fundamental principle at work here: literalism. To take something at face [...]

who do you know?

Jonathan Haidt: “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.” From the same op-ed, Nicholas D. Kristof writes: “Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions.” In other words, it may be easier for us, on a cognitive level, to understand the [...]